Death Is But A Parting
Chapter One
Downton Abbey October 2012
By August 1914, the earls of Grantham had already owned the Downton Abbey estate in the former East Riding of Yorkshire for well over four hundred years. For much of that time, the Crawleys had been viewed by many, although not by all, as capable and competent stewards of the estate itself, and also caring and considerate landlords to their tenants. Matthew Crawley - who became, somewhat unwillingly it must be admitted, the seventh earl upon the death of his father-in-law in October 1932 - viewed the whole set up with considerable distaste, referring to it disparagingly by turns as "archaic", "prehistoric" or "bloody feudal".
However, the loss of the greater part of his American wife Cora's fortune, as a result of unwise investments in the Canadian Grand Trunk Railroad made by Robert the sixth earl, in the years immediately prior to the First World War, had, in retrospect, marked the beginning of the inevitable decline of the Downton Abbey estate.
Despite the fact that he only became the seventh earl of Grantham in 1932, given the money which he had sunk into the estate, Matthew Crawley had, for many years previously, striven to try and place, and thereafter keep, the whole operation on a secure financial footing. Nevertheless, it was all too obvious to Matthew, if not to other members of his family, that, as with many other country estates, the years of plenty and of gilded splendor both at Downton and elsewhere were drawing inexorably to a close; a process hastened by declining agricultural receipts from the estate's farms, spiraling wage costs, punitive death duties, and thereafter by the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
The Second World War inevitably saw the main house requisitioned by the government, to serve as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen, much as it had done during the Great War, albeit now for all ranks instead of just officers. And this time, the immediate Crawley family, then comprising the mild mannered seventh earl, his wife the imperious countess Mary, and their four children James, Robert, Emma, and Louise, had to move out, and take up residence, along with a much reduced domestic staff, including their efficient, but perpetually morose, butler, Barrow, in the comfortable, far more practical, if decidedly less palatial, surroundings of the Dower House which had stood vacant ever since the death of Cora, Dowager Countess of Grantham in 1937.
It was the end of an era, for, the Crawleys would never thereafter live again at Downton Abbey as they had done before the war. True, the family moved back into the main house in the late autumn of 1945, but it was with an even further depleted domestic staff, and to but one wing of the mansion, the remainder of the house being left shut up, much of it now in poor repair, riddled with damp and dry rot, and in a sorry state after six years' rough usage by convalescing soldiers.
The vast majority of the splendid furnishings and priceless paintings were still in store, and would, indeed, not be begun to be brought out of storage until 1947, when despite impassioned, strenuous, and vociferous opposition from his wife Mary, the seventh earl made over the entire Downton Abbey estate, including the main house and all its contents, to the National Trust. It was, said Lord Grantham, taking a sanguine view of the dire financial situation, the only way of safeguarding the house, its furnishings, and paintings for the future. Otherwise, and in all likelihood, the estate would have to be sold to pay death duties.
In any case, there was simply insufficient money available to modernise the cottages, to re-equip the farms, to restore the overgrown gardens, to put the house itself back into a proper state of repair and conserve its contents, let alone live in it again as the family had once done.
The death of the seventh earl's son and heir, James, aged just nineteen, at Dunkirk in June 1940, hit the Crawley family especially hard. In fact, it was said that his father, Matthew, never really got over the death of his eldest son, and when the seventh earl himself passed away in 1959, with the Downton estate now having been in the care of the National Trust for some twelve years, the title of earl of Grantham passed to James's younger brother Robert, who together with his wife and family, continued to live on at the Dower House, while retaining a small flat in the Abbey, which, under the terms of the Deed of Transfer, the National Trust graciously permitted the family to use for a few weeks each year.
Mary, Dowager Countess of Grantham, who now resided in an estate cottage down in the village was often heard to remark how frightful everything had become, that the Crawleys had been reduced to beggary and servitude. Would she be expected to serve cream teas to the common herd who roamed at will throughout, and swarmed all over, what had, after all, been her own home for the past sixty years?
Had such visits been restricted to the week-ends, then in Mary's view they might just have been able to be borne with equanimity. But what made matters infinitely worse, in fact unbearable, was that visitations by the hoi polloi were not just restricted to the week-ends.
Instead, they arrived on an almost daily basis, initially on foot or by train, and then, when the branch line to Downton closed in 1961, thereafter by car and by the coach load, attired in their cheap, garish clothes, bringing with them their awful accents and their revolting, badly behaved, impertinent, ice cream eating children. In fact, some of the parents were as bad, if not worse than their grinning, ghastly, ape like offspring. Mary was certain that some of them were retarded; and not only the children. And that was just the British. Then, of course, there were the Americans, about whom the least said the better …
No, it would have been far better if the house had been set alight and burnt to the ground. And, thought Mary, I know just the man for the task.
God knows what her late parents, let alone her grandmother, would have made of the present situation. And if all of this was not bad enough, her surviving son Robert, the present earl, had to work for a living - as an architect. Not that Robert seemed to mind, specialising as he did in the restoration of period properties.
His wife, Jane, practical and unassuming for all that she was now Countess of Grantham was a nursing sister with the newly established National Health Service. Her imperious mother-in-law remarked wryly that nursing indeed ran in the Crawley family since her own youngest sister, the late and much loved Lady Sybil Branson, had served as a nurse in the convalescent hospital established at Downton during the Great War, before she scandalised her entire family and half the county by running off and marrying the family chauffeur - a handsome, penniless Irishman by the name of Tom Branson - a union with which Mary had, despite appearances to the contrary, never quite come to terms.
And, following the death of her sister Sybil, which sad event occurred in the summer of 1920, immediately after she had given birth to a daughter, who would be named for her late mother, her distraught father Tom had, with the establishment of the Irish Free State now secured, shaken the dirt of England from off of his feet forever, moved back to live in Ireland, and thereafter all contact with him and his baby daughter - Mary's only niece - was lost. Letters to Tom Branson, written and posted to the last address the family had for him in Dublin, if delivered, went unanswered.
Eventually, though not without considerable regret on the part of her husband Matthew, the Crawleys gave up attempting to try and re-establish any form of contact - which Mary herself felt was probably for the best. After all, not only was Tom Branson a rabid socialist, but also, at least in Mary's opinion, possessed of a tendency to pyromania; in short, Tom Branson was an arsonist. Someone in whose capable hands a simple box of matches and a jerry can of petrol became instruments of lethal destruction, capable of rivaling the total devastation wrought by the Luftwaffe in the Blitz, or by the Americans in the skies over Japan with their new fangled atomic bombs. He was hardly the kind of individual whom the earl of Grantham would want to acknowledge as his brother-in-law, even if that was the view of Mary herself rather than that of her mild mannered husband.
For Matthew, for some strange, unfathomable reason, continued to harbour a very soft spot for his errant, Irish brother-in-law. But then Matthew himself was soft hearted, if not, but only in the opinion of his overbearing wife, actually soft headed as well. However, it was Mary herself who, in 1947, and in the continuing absence of Tom Branson, had threatened to burn Downton Abbey to the ground, rather than see it taken over by the National Trust and opened to the public, so her continuing festering resentment towards her absent Irish brother-in-law, probably now deceased, for one apparent act of historic arson, was rather difficult to comprehend.
Robert, the present earl, and his wife Jane had three children - Matthew, Robert, and Edith - their daughter named at her birth for Mary's surviving sister, Lady Edith Crawley, spectacularly jilted at the altar by a long dead elderly knight of the realm Sir Anthony Strallan - a real duffer, a widower, and far too old - in Mary's opinion - to be marrying her sister in the first place. But then, poor, plain Edith never had had much luck with men.
Thereafter, Edith, who never married, picked herself up, and devoted her life to her nephew's three children and those of Emma and Louise her two nieces, took up archaeology, and spent much of her time travelling to the far flung corners of the rapidly disintegrating British Empire, in search of new sites to excavate. No wonder then, given her seemingly insatiable interest in old relics and other ancient artifacts, that she had been attracted to Sir Anthony Strallan in the first place, thought Mary cattily.
Comparatively late in her life, Edith even took up flying, and it was while flying solo somewhere near the ancient city of Petra in Transjordan, out in the Middle East, in April 1952, that her single seater plane disappeared. No wreckage was ever found and Edith's memorial service, held several months later in the parish church at Downton was a service without a body. Edith reflected Mary ruefully, had always been a bloody nuisance, and proved to be just as troublesome in the manner of her death.
By the autumn of 1982, although Mary would not live to see it, having passed away in 1979, on the very day when by revolution the last Shah of Iran was forced into exile, her son Robert's three children were all married and had offspring of their own: - Matthew to Jemima - a sweet girl, but who with a name like that would always doubtless have reminded the late Dowager Countess of one of Beatrix Potter's feathered creations; Robert to Alexandra, a girl he met at university at Cambridge. Of course, had Mary been alive, she would have had something to say about the fact that the girl's parents were undeniably in trade - even if they owned a chain of very successful department stores.
As for Edith - she preferred "Edi" - she proved to be just as troublesome as her namesake, and her late grandmother's sister had been. Passionately fond of horses, Edi took up with an itinerant, a Romany gypsy by the name of Tommy Lee, whom she met, quite by chance - or was it - as one was never quite sure with Edi - at the blacksmith's forge down in the village.
Exactly what, had she been alive to witness it, her grandmother Mary would have had to say about the relationship can only be imagined. After all, even at the end of her life, Mary had still not fully come to terms with her youngest sister Sybil's decision to marry the family chauffeur back in 1919. In fact, in Mary's view, things had never been quite the same thereafter.
And, given time, Mary would doubtless have found a way to hold her absent Irish brother-in-law accountable for the Second World War, the election of a Labour government in 1945, and the subsequent loss of the British Empire. Yes, in her view, Branson, whether dead or alive, still had a very great deal for which to answer.
Edi and Tommy went through a Romany marriage ceremony and thereafter proceeded to have a string of dark haired children together, all conceived and born in the vardo - the horse drawn caravan - they called home. Each year they returned to Downton in the autumn, in time for the annual Agricultural and Horse Fair which the National Trust staged in the grounds of the Abbey.
And, so it was, that in October 2012, Edi, Tommy, along with several of their numerous brood, found themselves once again, camped, at least for a while, in the familiar surroundings of the large paddock adjoining what had long ago, once been the Home Farm of Downton Abbey and which now housed the National Trust's Visitor Centre, Gift Shop, and Tea room.